TRAVELER'S EYE: THREE POINTS OF VIEW

TRAVELER'S EYE: THREE POINTS OF VIEW; OZARKS: SPRING OF BRIGHT WATER

Published: March 4, 1990

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I found a fallen log as a perch and sat watching the water hurtling downstream to join the Eleven Point River, a mile and a quarter away, more than doubling the size of the river in the process. One of the liveliest canoeing streams in southern Missouri, it is quiet above Greer but famous for the tricky currents that are a gift of the spring. The Eleven Point is part of the protected National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, but Greer Spring has always stayed in private hands. Just before the turn of the century, engineers wanted to dam its gorge. Of that project a Miss Owen wrote in 1898: ''The high walls of Greer Spring gorge will, of course, far more than double the value it would otherwise possess, when it becomes desirable to control and turn to practical account the power now going so cheerily to waste, but the artistic loss will be proportionately severe.'' Small mills have several times been built using its water for power, and today the derelict Greer Roller Mills, completed in 1899, still stands near the gate at the top of the hill, its clapboards gray and somber.

In 1915, Louis E. Dennig bought the spring and 7,000 acres surrounding it; his family kept the parcel intact, preserving what may be much of the spring's watershed from development until 1987, when his heirs decided they had to sell the land to pay estate taxes. Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis brewery, worked out a deal with the family to buy the spring (in company with the Nature Conservancy, which would manage the surrounding land) to bottle the spring water. By and large the people of Alton, the small town nearby, where the biggest employer is a feed store with a work force of 10, liked the idea. They viewed the 40 jobs that a bottling plant promised as a good and helpful thing. ''I wouldn't care if it had turned out to be Six Flags,'' said Connie Young, who with her husband runs Young's Produce. ''All we got down here is our beautiful land, and we can't eat that.'' The area's Congressman, William Emerson, who prides himself on looking after his constitutents and who has a record of backing proposals that will bring development and jobs to them, sided with Anheuser-Busch. But environmentalists raised such a ruckus that Anheuser-Busch pulled out.

Leo A. Drey, a wealthy Missouri conservationist and a sort of one-man Nature Conservancy, then bought up the tract in the spring of 1988, reportedly for $4.5 million. Mr. Drey, together with his L-A-D Foundation, has often moved in quickly to buy special Missouri lands that are under threat of development and then offer them to appropriate government or other nonprofit agencies for management. At last report he was still the reluctant owner of Greer Spring, willing to sell it, for a million dollars less than he paid for it, to the Federal government as part of the Scenic Rivers system. I climbed back up the hill to the gate, where a sign had warned, ''Do not attempt to walk the half mile to the spring unless you are in good health, as the return up the steep trail is exceedingly taxing.'' I stopped to say goodbye to the caretaker. Her jaw was tightly clenched, and she was scowling. A photographer had gone down to the spring early in the day and now, past noon, he was still there, staying long past her liking. She had just made up a new rule: No one can visit the spring for more than an hour. If I were asked to draw a portrait of Mother Nature, I could do worse than ask Greer Spring's caretaker to sit for me.

Photos: The Eleven Point River is fed by Greer Spring (right) with an average flow of 187 million gallons a day. (Matt Bradley)